How To Turn Google Sheets Into An RSS Reader?

Having a website and wish to embed the RSS feeds in your web pages? Need a complete control over the layout and the embedded content? Looking for a better approach than Flash or JavaScript Widgets? If your answer to these questions are a big Yes, then hurray! You landed on the right page.

This guide will help you to create an RSS feed reader using Google Sheets. All you need to do is just follow these simple steps.

Note: For illustration purpose, I am using the RSS feed URL of my own blog crackaloud.com. You can also use your RSS feed URL to generate the RSS reader for your web page.

How To Turn Google Sheets Into An RSS Reader?:

Step 1: Log into your Google Drive, open a new Google Sheets and name it as “Google Sheets RSS Reader” for easy recognition.

Step 2: In cell A1, just type the RSS feed URL of your webpage as shown in the screenshot below. In this case, I am using the RSS feed of this website: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrackAloud

Step 3: In cell A2, type the formula as shown in screenshot below and press enter.

Make sure that the words within the quotation are in lower case. This formula will fill the column A with the title of the 10 recent post in your website.

Step 4: In cell B2, type the formula as shown in the screenshot below and press enter.

This formula will fill the column B with the URLs of the corresponding titles in the column A.

Step 5: In cell C2, type “=Hyperlink (A2, B2)” and hit enter, to combine the title in A2 with the URL in B2 to make a clickable hyperlink. Copy the same formula to the cells C3-C11 as well.

Note: You can format the sheet as per your need, since we are using the regular google sheets.

Now to embed this feed in your web page, follow these steps.

Step 6: Go to “File” and click on “Publish to the web” in your spreadsheet. This will open the “Publish to the web” Dialog box as shown below.

Step 7: Now select the Embed Tab and under that select sheet1, and hit the “Publish” button. A pop-up will open, click “OK” in that.

Now you can add the embed code in your web page and display the Google Sheets RSS feed reader to your visitors.

The Google sheets will automatically refresh the content when your website is updated.

By following this method, you can embed hundreds of RSS feed into your single Google sheet.

If you encounter any issues while following this tutorial, do let me know via comments.